It is important to put environmental education into practice at schools in Japan. But the contents and methods for such a practice are not clear. The purpose of this paper is to point out the problems of environmental education from the viewpoint of "purposes," "contents" and "types of curriculum construction," and to make clear the present conditions and the practical problems in elementary schools. Our chief instrument for doing this is a paper survey distributed to 160 pilot schools in Japan. We analyzed 66 schools' answers and pointed out the following problems; 1) We can divide the principles of environmental education into "the means for personality formation" and "problem solving concerning the environment." But each of concrete contents is not clear in practice and, moreover, it is influenced by the regional characteristics and the management conditions. 2) There are many types of environmental education curricula, and many schools practice their original activities. But actually there are not many schools that provide the special classes for environmental education in their school curriculum. 3) Many pilot schools point out some concrete practical problems about "special class setting," "money to practice with," "continuity in environmental education practice" and "teaching methods," and so on. We think that these problems mainly result from practices in the sphere of the subject-centered curriculum. We can not properly evaluate the school curriculum for environmental education from this paper survey alone, but we can clarify the problems in practice and give some points to select a typical type of pilot schools which have characteristic curricula in environmental education. We have to visit the pilot schools and the regions, make a concrete and synthetic analysis of the environmental education curriculum, and evaluate the curriculum from the viewpoint of children's growth related to awareness, knowledge, attitude, and participation in their local and wider environmental activities.

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